Choosing the right public cloud provider is becoming an increasingly nuanced discussion that goes well beyond scale. We all know the large cloud players--AWS, Google Cloud Platform, IBM Cloud and Microsoft Azure--but stacking them up depends on your enterprise's needs.

Here's a crack at stacking up the cloud providers and how Oracle and Alibaba are edging into the game based on annual run rates.

First, a few things to note: This list of public cloud providers revolves around the service providers that offer software-, platform- and infrastructure-as-a-service offerings. There are many more cloud providers that specialize in some part of the enterprise software stack.

Increasingly, companies will combine the large public cloud providers along with a specialist. In other words, Salesforce has partnerships with Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform and works with IBM too. Workday and IBM are closely linked on many fronts.

Among the largest public cloud players, the disclosure and transparency into products, financials and pricing is better than ever. With that reality in mind here's a look at the large public cloud players based on public comments, earnings reports and RightScale's 2018 State of the Cloud Report.

We believe that Google Cloud platform, based on publicly reported data for the 12 months ending December 2017, is the fastest growing major public cloud provider in the world. We're also increasingly doing larger, more strategic deals with customers. In fact, a number of deals worth over $1 million across all cloud products more than tripled from 2016 to 2017.

With Google offering a bit of disclosure around its cloud business it became much easier to establish a pecking order in terms of sales. Microsoft on its latest quarter disclosed its commercial cloud revenue and an annual run rate north of $21 billion.

Enterprise adoption

When you look at the major public cloud providers, it's clear that AWS and Microsoft Azure are the two top dogs. RightScale's survey of 997 respondents across multiple industries and company sizes tells the tale.

The problem with the Microsoft vs. AWS storyline is that the two cloud giants don't exactly sync up well. Microsoft's commercial cloud revenue includes Office 365, which dominates in sales.

The main services that are in commercial cloud are Azure; Office 365 business services (Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Skype for Business Online, Microsoft Teams); Dynamics 365; and its Enterprise Mobility + Security Suite (EMS).

What's clear based on the RightScale survey is that the public cloud pie is growing for all the major players offering a stack.

The takeaway here is that these cloud providers are likely to share enterprise customers, which will look to optimize costs and often pit the vendors against each other.

Hooks into hybrid

While enterprises are looking to have multiple cloud players in their stack, they're also likely to run their private clouds too. This hybrid cloud approach is likely to persist for the foreseeable future.

For me, it all comes down to really having an architectural advantage on what is a new secular trend. So when we think about the intelligent cloud and the intelligent edge and then bring that to the Azure business, you can see it at each layer. When it comes to infrastructure, we're the only cloud provider that provides true hybrid cloud computing with Azure and Azure Stack. When it comes to the data tier, we have real uniqueness.

Microsoft's Azure bet is that a consistent stack across the public cloud, data center, Internet of things and edge and data will win in the enterprise with hybrid approaches.

Given that AWS is paired up with VMware and Microsoft has its own stack across the enterprise, Google Cloud Platform hooked up with Cisco with its hybrid data plan.

The Google-Cisco partnership shouldn't be dismissed--especially since so much of it revolves around containers. Container adoption--specifically Kubernetes and Docker--surged in the RightScale survey and appears to be baked into future architecture plans.

On the cloud system and private cloud fronts, Microsoft and Oracle have integrated hardware and service systems as does Cisco and IBM.

We want everyone to be able to use machine learning for their own needs. We recently gave Google Cloud customers access to Auto ML, which makes it far easier to build complex new enrollments. Since its launched a few weeks ago, over 10,000 customers have already signed up to try.

Add it up and it's a lot to digest for any enterprise technology buyer. Don't sweat the concerns about the AI bake-off. Here's why: Chances are strong that you will have multiple machine learning and AI vendors in your company. You'll ultimately pick the cloud and machine learning models that work and that means a portfolio approach.

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